>>34 Japanese words do rely on pitch. It's just like someone speaking English with the wrong accents. It's possible to understand what that person means thought effort, but they are /not/ speaking English as any native speaker does.
>>35 English words do rely on stress (which contrary to popular belief does rely on pitch primarily not loudness). 'Whitehouse' (where the President's office is located) is pronounced different from 'white house'
(a house that is white).
>>68 You may have learned to say things in English in two weeks, but you did not learn English in two weeks.
As for my own idea of the hardest languages, I can only speak from an native point of view of a native English speaker who is good at syntax/morphology but bad at discriminating pitch. With that said, I'd say Chinese for speaking/listening. Tones are difficult for me to discriminate within a syllable because the more subtle differences never really mattered that much in English. However, writing in Chinese is very easy for me. The syntax isn't difficult at all and hanzi is not incredibly difficult if you can remember them (which, yes, can to some degree be predicted by their sound 教(v. jiao1) 教(n. jiao4) 快(adj. kuai4) 筷子 (n. kuai4zi)). But learning Chinese did help my ability to guess on-yomi and the meanings of compounds (even if I can't read them).